1. Technical Field
The disclosed technology relates to the fields of monitoring persistent virtual environments and Social Network Analysis of on-line entities within the persistent virtual environment.
2. Background Art
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are becoming increasingly popular with subscribers in the millions. The MMOG providers sell a product (the software executed on a player's computer) and a service (by making a persistent virtual environment available to the account holder) for a periodic subscription fee. Thus, account holder retention is financially important to the MMOG provider because the longer the player associated with the account holder remains involved with the MMOG, the longer the MMOG provider receives subscription income. Hence, the MMOG providers are motivated to create and sustain healthy, long lived, online player communities.
Maintaining and increasing subscriber motivation to continue the subscription is a major business focus of the game industry. However, no diagnostic tools are available to timely measure the social aspects of player interactions in the persistent virtual environment or to measure or monitor the health of the online player community in a persistent virtual environment. While the MMOG provider can gather massive amounts of information about the persistent virtual environment, this information must be analyzed at high cost with, for example, Microsoft® Excel® or SPSS®. Thus, it is difficult, expensive and time consuming for the MMOG provider to monitor the social health of the persistent virtual environment and the analysis results only reflect the state of the persistent virtual environment at the time the data was collected. Thus the analysis is not timely, has no capability to forecast problems, and only operates from single source of information.
Microsoft, Excel, are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation of Redmond Wash. SPSS is a registered trademark of SPSS Inc., of Chicago, Ill.
Marc Smith et al. in Visualization Components for Persistent Conversations, Proceedings of CHI'2001 (Seattle Wash., April 1998), ACM Press, pages 136-143, teaches analyzing and presenting a snapshot visualization of interpersonal connections extracted from newsgroup communications.
Warren Sack, in Conversation Map: An Interface for Very-Large-Scale Conversations, Journal of Management Information Systems, Winter 2000, Vol. 17, No. 3, pages 73-92, taught a series of visualization panels to analyze social interactions in newsgroup to help readers navigate the newsgroup's information space.
Smith and Sack only teach analyzing data from a single information source (the newsgroup).
Nicolas Ducheneaut, in Socialization in an Open Source software community: A socio-technical analysis, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14(4), pages 323-368, taught techniques for visualizing interactions between people and interactions between people and things (for example, software code) over time. Ducheneaut teaches accessing a variety of information sources, but is narrowly focused to Open Source Software development projects.
It would be advantageous to provide a way to timely monitor persistent virtual environments and to measure, monitor, and treat the health of online player communities within persistent virtual environments.